Crawl

Easygoing, animal attack summer nonsense. An alligator survival taking place during a category-5 hurricane looks good on paper, especially with Aja behind the cameras a Raimi as producer. That would be, of course, if these gentlemen had taken it with more darkness and horror. Crawl, unfortunately, doesn’t have much balls, which is surprising given Aja’s history. The gore is missing, everything is hidden either in the dark or behind curtains of splashing water. The alligators sometimes look a bit artificial, but not much. What is horrifying, though, are the dialogues between the father and the daughter. Brr! (11/07/2019)

A bland feeding of deadly predators that won’t offend any connoisseur of the genre, but may cause some harmless grumble in their bellies if they think about Alexandre Aja’s early and very uncompromising stuff. Piranha 3D, albeit a colossal insanity, was a lot more fun and bold as a movie. Crawl sticks to its characters and manages to bring the viewer close, but it’s unable to sell the threat of the alligator in a naturalistic or tense enough way. But it’s a fine flick nevertheless, with pretty good actors and a good director that used to be great, which in this case is a real shame. (14/10/2019)

Quentin Tarantino declared Crawl to be his favorite movie this year and I understand why. The simple story of a swimmer/daughter in a flood zone in Florida looking for her dad whom she can’t get in touch with has more to it than it seems at the beginning. Although this tense horror chase movie with a dramatic foundation comprising the dad/daughter relationship turns into a classic B-movie in the end, the heroes aren’t dumb and are played well (with Kaya Scodelario giving an unbelievable performance), and there are abundant bloody surprises. (06/11/2019)

Crawl doesn't set out to be an animal horror film that in any way stands out from the ranks within its genre, but that's not to say that it's bland through and through. As far as the technical workmanship goes, the film features realistically rendered scenes with alligators that hardly look artificial at all. Unlike Alexandre Aja's Piranha 3D, there are no hectolitres of blood in this case and the film also focuses on family and the relationship between the daughter and the father. They could have toned down a bit on this relationship line and added more dark, horror scenes, though there were a few good scares. All that being said, this is a thrilling piece that will surely keep the inhabitants of the alligator areas away from waterlogged places for some time, and which I would compare in quality to 2016's The Shallows. (15/07/2019)

Crawl has a nice digital setting and, in the second half, a decent build-up of suspense and unpredictable use of the limited stage. Given the seemingly transparent plot that involves a skillful swimmer and her relationship with her father that needs to be healed, it turned out to be quite a profoundly written and directed survival-horror movie. It’s a half-star more enjoyable than the similarly themed The Shallows. (27/08/2019)